


aria.

by palaces_outofparagraphs



Series: after laughter [7]
Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Anti Ezria, Gen, anti ezra fitz, aria being her own hero, aria realizing she deserves better, aria taking charge of her own damn destiny, aria. oh aria., coffee metaphors, do not read this if you like ezra! you will be mad!, this is drenched and soaked in anti ezria sentiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 13:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11806815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palaces_outofparagraphs/pseuds/palaces_outofparagraphs
Summary: a·ri·a - a long, accompanied song, for a solo voice. // A year after the divorce is finalized, more at peace and stronger than she's ever been, Aria reflects on everything that has brought her to this point.





	aria.

**Author's Note:**

> this story is extremely important to me because honestly i think the resolution of ezria as ultimately positive was the biggest let down of pll, and so harmful to so many viewers. aria montgomery was a strong and wonderful character, and to fall prey to the man who destroyed her youth was such a tragic ending for her, especially when it was framed in such a joyful context. so i wrote this because toxic relationships shouldn't have happy endings; and i thought aria making it on her own was the happiest of them all. i really hope you like it - this is very different from the rest of the series, mostly because it isn't spencer-centric, but i hope you enjoy it anyway.

 

“So, what, are you guys, like, moving?” Aria sets down two cups of coffee. All the girls are invited for brunch; Spencer is here first, but Emily and Alison are on their way, and Hanna will be here after she drops off Ashlynne at a friend’s. 

A year after the divorce is finalized, and the apartment Aria rents from Lucas still feels too quiet, too big, most days. Filling it up with her friends is the only thing that can really make the ache in her chest - the chasm that was wrenched apart when she was sixteen, that she didn’t realize was there until she was twenty four - subside.

(Of course, it never really does. It never really does. Never truly.)

“No,” says Spencer slowly, stirring her coffee and looking up Aria. “We’re.. not moving. Not permanently.”

Aria tries to hide her tension. A world without Spencer is intolerable to even imagine, and when she had called the night before, to talk about an extended and viscerally painful therapy session with Toby, and mentioned their plans for an extended holiday, she had tried to sound as happy as possible - but it scares her. Rosewood is the kind of place once you leave, you want to stay gone, and what if Spencer stays gone? What if the girls aren’t enough to pull her back anymore? “Okay, how long are you going for?”

Spencer twists her fingers. “Well, I graduate next month,” she says, unable to keep the pride brimming from her voice. “We’re leaving the week after that. So, May. My new job doesn’t start till the new year, but the plan is to be home before then. It could be a month or two, or it could be..longer.”

“Or forever, eh?” says Aria, trying to keep her voice light.

Spencer laughs. “No. I don’t - no. Not forever.” She takes a long sip of coffee. Aria only knows bits and pieces of the week long breakdown she had after speaking at Alison’s class - if there’s one thing all four girls know, it’s that the good is always followed by bad - and she knows a fair amount about the two hour session Spencer had yesterday, as well as pretty thorough discussion of adjustment to her medication. But Aria knows that although maybe she’s better today, she is still fragile, raw. Her hands shake around the coffee cup, and her voice is not her own - it is the stripped, barely there version that she remembers from the worst days of their teens.

Aria aches for Spencer.

Thoughts of Ezra come, the way they always do at their most inconvenient, but Aria furls her own fingers around coffee mug and forces them away, forces to focus on Spence in front of her.

“What are you going to do about - you know, appointments and stuff while you’re gone?” she asks.

“I can do phone ins,” says Spencer. “And virtual things..and if I really need to, my doctor says she has contacts I can reach out to in London.” Words lie unspoken between them; that maybe, in London, they won’t need therapists. That maybe, in a world so far away from their own, everything will be peaceful, safe.

“It’ll be kind of weird though, won’t it,” Spencer says, after a few seconds. “Because of my twin sister, and Wren, and everything.”

“No,” says Aria. “No, it won’t be weird. That might as well never have happened.”

Spencer smiles wanly. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she murmurs.

Aria reaches across the table, squeezing her hand. “Spence, what went wrong this week?”

Spencer sighs. “I was doing really well for a bit, after Alison’s class,” she says. “I really was, I - it was like, I had let go of a little bit of it. Like talking to those kids...it made it feel like I really had moved on.” Her voice catches. “Like maybe, in some way, it really is over. But. It isn’t.”

“DId something  _ happen?” _

“I just - it all got too good, I guess. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“It got too good. Everything felt too okay. So I had to pick holes.” She starts to rap her hand, probably unconsciously, against the table. “And Toby is always the easiest target - because that hurts the most.”

This is still a little bit hard for Aria to hear. Because even though he stalked her, violated her, manipulated her, spent years grooming and breaking her, some damn part of her still misses Ezra.

She stands up and turns towards the fridge, pulling out the food she prepared the night before. Em and Ali will be here any minute, after all. “Yeah,” she says, not facing Spencer.

“So I started telling myself he would leave me. All the time. Just, every second. You know how thoughts get sometimes?”

“Yeah. I know.” All too well.

“Yeah. And - it got bad. And it culminated in this insane nightmare, and I was up all night crying, and the nxet day I basically begged him to break up with me..”

She winces. “Oh God.”

“Yeah. Well, thank God for Toby, I guess.”

Aria doesn’t say anything.

“I mean - ” Spencer swears under her breath. “Sorry, Aria. I’m sorry.”

Aria turns back to her, smiling. “No,  _ don’t _ apologize,” she says emphatically. “Don’t apologize, okay? It’s…” she closes her eyes, recallibrating. “Listen. I’m really, really glad you have Toby in your life. Okay? I don’t resent that for one second.”

“You know you’re better without him,” says Spencer after a moment. “You know you are.”

“I know,” says Aria, turning to look out the window, ostensibly to see if Em and Ali are here yet, but really so she can at least pretend Spencer hasn’t seen her wiping the tear off her cheek. “But that doesn’t make it easier.”

Spencer exhales. “Nothing does,” she says.

“Yeah. Nothing does.”

\--

Later, after all the girls have come and left and the house is empty again, Aria drifts to her tiny bedroom, which is largely unromantic but for the window seat tucked into the corner. She curls into it with her duvet and a glass of white wine, presses her cheek against the cool glass, closes her eyes, and tries not to remember.

_ Where is he now?  _ she wonders. In the end, she told him that she wouldn’t press charges - wouldn’t even bring the past and the inception of their relationship into the divorce proceedings, if he left. If he went far away, and never, ever came home.

Spencer said she completely understood and obviously supported any way Aria chose to end this, but Aria could see in her eyes everything she wasn’t saying.  It was hard to know a person  ten years and keep what you were thinking from them, and Aria could see everything Spencer wanted to say. She wanted to say that letting Ezra off so easy was not only bad for Aria, but irresponsible for the rest of the world. That he would go out there again and who knows who we would hurt.

Aria knows, even now, that Spencer was right. That it wasn’t the right or good or just thing to let Ezra leave; to let him hurt somebody else; to never have him pay for what he did to her, to Ali, to all the girls, and - though it is terrifying to think of - to who really knows who else. That it was, from any perspective you looked at it, Aria’s  _ duty,  _ to herself, to her friends, to the world as a whole, to press charges against Ezra. To have him go to jail for life.

But she had been running for so, so long. Maybe ten years, even if she had only just noticed the pain in this last leg of the marathon. She had been running for ages and ages, and her legs were a thousand pounds, and her back was in agony, and she just wanted to  _ lie down  _ and  _ rest.  _ She had been running and the finish line was  _ so close - _ freedom, and peace, and a chance at life, was so close. And doing what she rightfully should have done would have moved that line up by miles. She would have had to run for so much longer.

It was so mch easier just to end it.

But most days, she can’t think like that. Most days, she can’t think of him at all.

Even now, it is hard to put words on what it all was - what it really was, every minute it of it, after she insisted for so so long that it was love, pure and real and nothing but that. It was almost impossible at first, to put words on it; words like  _ coercion  _ and  _ manipulation _ and even - the reddest of the red flags, the ultimate  _ why didn’t you leave, why didn’t you leave, why didn’t you leave -  _ abuse.

_ But he never hit me, _ she would say in those early days of piecing it together, those early days when the entire world was weighing itself down on her, when her universe had upended, when the sky had dropped to the ground, and she was still eating breakfast across the table from that man every morning.  _ He never hurt me. He never even came close. _

“But he kept you away from the people you loved,” Spencer would say, choosing her words as carefully as one might choose the best kind of fruit from the supermarket.

“But he kind of, you know,” Hanna would say, unnaturally tense, “slept with you when you were sixteen years old, and he was in his twenties. That was...you know. There was no way you really could have..” She would trail off, and words Aria had known all her life but had always closed her eyes to in favor of  _ but this is different this is love, but this is  different this is love, but this is different this is love,  _ a rhythm she was so used to that picking it apart was like picking apart the world, came floating into the space between them, unsaid, unused, left aside for now. Words like consent and coercion; words like minor and words like _statutory_ _. _

“But he  _ lied, _ ” Emily would say. “He lied  _ so much. _ ”

It started before then, really - the slow dissolution of whatever there was between her and Ezra, for better or for worse (she knows, knows, knows that it was for better, but it is hard, to train herself out of the habit of love. He hurt her and he pushed her to her limits and he took advantage of her in ways no one should ever have taken advantage of a child, a  _ child;  _ but still she knows that love - that desperate, seizing, wanting love, wanting for this to be more than it was - like the back of her hand.) The beginning of the forgetting started just after their first anniversary. 

At that time, Spencer, always ahead of them all, had been in therapy for about a year, going at every single one of her issues with a hammer and iron fist. Alison and Emily and Hanna had all insisted the kids kept them too busy every time Spencer brought up the benefits of it, and Aria would just laugh. There was something deeply rooted in her chest those days that was viscerally against the very idea of ever talking to anyone about anything that had ever happened to her.

(Well, in hindsight, for obvious reasons, namely, having been conditioned since the age of sixteen to want to protect Ezra against all others. The root was still there; it had long grown into an oak tree, branches clinging off of her limbs. But she spent her days fighting it.)

And then, one day, Spencer and Aria had had lunch. 

\--

_ Spencer only had good things to say about therapy that year; how much it helped, how clarifying it was, how much easier life it was. Later, Aria realized she was just trying to subtly coax the rest of them into seeking out help, too. Therapy was the hardest thing any of them had ever done, including the actual trauma itself. But she still appreciated Spencer’s effort. _

_ “Isn’t it - like,” Aria said, spearing a piece of lettuce on her fork, “really, really - like, how do you talk about all that? How do you even make those words come out of your mouth?” _

_ Spencer shrugged. “It was really, really hard at first,” she said. “But..it’s gets easier.” _

_ “I just, I feel like I don’t even want to - I feel like it wouldn’t help, talking about it all. It would just make it worse.” _

_ “It does feel like that at first,” said Spencer carefully. “But it’s also a bit like.. I dunno. It’s like sorting things through, and putting them in an order that makes more sense. And sometimes, getting it out there..it’s kind of like excavating yourself.” _

_ “But there’s some things that happened,” said Aria, “that i wouldn’t want anyone to know about.” _

_ Spencer didn’t say anything for a few minutes, too many minutes, enough that Aria began to feel uneasy. “You don’t have to tell her everything,” said Spencer. “But if you’re talking about how you started dating Ezra..” she trailed off. _

_ “Then what?” said Aria, knowing without knowing that she didn’t want to hear the end of the sentence - or maybe she only knew in hindsight. _

_ “You and Ezra,” Spencer said carefully, “you had a very..unorthodox, relationship, at the beginning.” _

_ Aria tensed. “That doesn’t mean - ” Instantly defensive, as always - always coming to his defense. _

_ “I’m not saying it means anything,” said Spencer. “I just. You were pretty young. And you’ve been with him, you know, a third of your life, a lot of that time pretty intense development years.” _

_ “I had five of the most important years of my life away from him, development wise,” said Aria, who had found reasons long ago why all this made sense. “And I missed him every second. I had enough time to clear my head about the situation, I’m not a teenager anymore - ” _

_ “I know. I know. All I mean is that it doesn’t hurt to talk about troubles in the past. If anything, it can make your relationship stronger.” _

_ They were silent for some time, a slightly more intense silence this time. _

_ “So, have you told your therapist how Toby used to be A yet, then?” Aria said, and regretted it the moment it came out of her mouth.  _

_ Spencer looked at her for a long moment. “No,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. “I haven’t.” _

_ They was another silence then, and Aria felt guilt swoop through her. “Spence, I - ” _

_ “It’s fine,” Spencer cut in, smiling. “It’s fine.”  _

_ Lunch had ended very quickly after that,  _

_ Later that night, Aria called her.  _

_ “I’m sorry for what I said about Toby,” she said. Ezra was in the next room; she could hear him typing. She was curled into the corner of the couch with her cell phone and a mug of tea, and she was feeling very comfortable and cozy, and as content with her life as she could get. _

_ “It’s okay,” Spencer said. _

_ “It really doesn’t sound okay. Look, I didn’t mean - ” _

_ “No, I’m glad you said it,” said Spencer firmly. “Look. All I was trying to say is, you and Ezra had a weird start to your relationship. and you had a lot of bumps along the road. Talking to an objective party about that is not the worst thing in the world.” _

_ “Well, in our case, it is,” said Aria. “Because Ezra would go to jail.” _

_ Spencer took a long, deep breath in, and Aria could picture her expression - the same one she got when she was sixteen, and she knew the answer, but the teacher wanted to give someone else a chance. “Okay. Well. Maybe not with a therapist, but that’s something you two...could talk about. How your relationship started. And what that means.” _

_ “It doesn’t mean anything.” _

_ “Okay, if you think that, that’s fine, I love you, I’m sorry I brought this up, and I have to go now okay? Bye, Aria.” _

_ “Bye, Spencer.” _

_ \-- _

_ Her words stayed with her, though, until the next morning at breakfast. _

_  “Hey, Ezra?” she said, as he leafed through the newspaper, half asleep, hair adorably mussed. _

_ He looked up, his eyes sleepy. “Yeah, baby?” _

_ “Is there anything you regret about our relationship? Is there anything..you would change?” _

_ He raised his eyebrows, snorting with laughter, taking a sip of his coffee, black like he always took it. “That sounds a little like a trick question.” _

_ She laughed too, taking a sip of her own coffee, so flooded with hazelnut creamer and chocolate and sugar that she could barely taste the coffee, just like she had taken it when she was sixteen years old. “No, I mean.. I’m just wondering. If you could do it again. Would you do anything differently?” _

_ “Well, obviously, I wouldn’t have stalked you and your friends,” he said, turning the page of the paper. _

_ Aria didn’t say anything, and Spencer’s words played in her head quietly, and then, from a part of her mind that she didn’t know existed came the thought -  _ he’s awfully casual about it all.

_ Well, so are we, now, she reasoned. It’s how we deal with it. We’re casual. _

_ Well, that’s us, said the quiet, new part of her mind. Because we’re traumatized. What trauma did  _ he  _ go through? _

_ Ezra had stopped paying attention to this, maybe forgot they were having a conversation at all, and was lost once more in his newspaper and black coffee. “Ezra?” she said. _

_ “Yeah?” _

_ “Would you not change.. you know, that I was sixteen? And that you kissed me, but you knew I was sixteen?” Her heart was beating fast, but she told herself they were adults, past it, had a real relationship, and could now talking about all this. _

_ But he didn’t. He didn’t talk about it. he looked up, his eyes mildly amused, as if she were posing a series of slightly interesting riddles. “You know I don’t regret a single thing about us,” he said. “I love you. I always have, Aria. There’s never been anything that could stop that.” _

_ It felt wrong. She hated that feeling in her chest, that this was wrong, she tried to push it down, but out of nowhere, with Spencer’s words playing in her mind, it felt wrong that he didn’t feel weird about how they had began. “Well, I know you love me. But you gotta admit, it was weird. It wasn’t optimal.” _

_ He shrugged. “What kind of love story is?” _

_ “We’re not a love  _ story, _ ” she said. “We’re people. I was an actual sixteen year old girl.” _

_ He met her eyes more completely than he had for the entire conversation, and she was almost afraid of what she sees in his. “Aria, where is this coming from? You know I love you. Why does this matter?” _

You know I love you,  _ he had said. And she let the conversation go that morning, but for the first time, she heard in that  _ I love you  _ something she had not heard in his voice before, or something that perhaps she hadn’t wanted to hear.  _

_ I love you, he had said, I love you and I deserve to love you. I deserve you, I’ve always deserved you. _

_ I love you, and that makes everything okay. _

_ But for the first time, she was wondering whether or not it did. _

-

She takes a deep, long sigh. She has almost drained her wine glass, just a bit swirling at the bottom, her head still clear. 

_ I survived,  _ she reminds herself.  _ I survived. I made it. I made it all the way up to here, and that’s all that matters. _

But it is so hard some days. Some days she is so afraid. Some days she is disgusted with herself, disgusted with her sixteen year old self even, for letting it happen. For letting it happen, again and again, and for actively seeking it out to happen, and never stopping it once. Some days she blames herself so completely that the guilt she is mired in is so heavy she can’t get out of bed. 

Some days she can take apart the situation and look at it rationally. Some days she realizes that he was her  _ teacher - _

that she was a  _ child - _

And on those days she cannot breathe.

\--

_ “I was sixteen,” she said into the phone. “I was sixteen and he did it all anyway. He knew and he did it all anyway.” _

_ Spencer exhaled into the phone. It was 2 am, and Aria had been lying awake all night. For weeks, sort of, but it was unbearable tonight. “I know,” she said. “I know.” _

\--

_ Between now and then, they had a lot of half conversations, her and Ezra. Where she peppered him with inquiries, casual, dressed up as lover’s talk, where that quiet, quiet part of her brain spoke more and more loudly every day. _

_ She asked him, every few days, in different words each time, if he ever regretted dating a child. Not regretted dating her, even; but if he could have done it differently. If he could have just fast forwarded, fallen in love with her when they were both old enough, he would have. _

_ And, in a way that made her think that he thought it was actually romantic, he said no every single time. _

_ She came to two realizations that made her sick to her stomach, sick to her lungs, so sick she started to have trouble keeping her lunch down. That he knew he was falling in love with a child. That maybe that was the whole reason he fell in love in the first place. _

_ The second was that she was not real to him. Still not real. She was a character in a story he wrote himself. She was paper and ink to him.  _

_ She started to see a counselor. She started to look up the numbers of lawyers. Her heart started to pound all the time when she heard his footsteps down the hall, and not in a good way. She began to take her coffee with less hazelnut creamer, chocolate, and sugar every day, forcing herself to taste the bitterness. Forcing herself to wake up. _

_ \-- _

Other days, she is, down to her bones, terrified. Terrified, and remembering of what he used to be capable of. Remembering how he stalked them -  _ children _ \- for years, watching their every move, knowing exactly what they were going through, how he looked her in the eye and swore he loved her again and again and again and again. On those days, or more often, nights, she patrols her corridors, checking that her windows are padlocked twice, barricading the door with chairs and shelves. She is so afraid. As long as she lives, she will be afraid of him, and in those days too, she hates herself, for not having the bravery to have put him behind bars all those years ago.

She knows he can never come back. Knows in a deeper way than any of the other girls. But she is afraid of ghosts and always has been.

\--

_ “I am not in love with you anymore.” _

_ He turned a page in his newspaper. And he still didn’t look at her. _

_ “Are you listening to me?” _

_ “Yes,” he said. “You’re being very strange, Aria.” _

_ “I said I don’t love you.” _

_ “You’re confused,” he said, so smoothly, so certainly, that she couldn’t help but wonder if he was right. “It’s been a hard week.” _

_ “I don’t love you,” she said again. “I don’t love you. I never loved you. You  _ tricked  _ me.” _

_ He laughed. Actually, genuinely laughed. “I didn’t trick you,” he said. “I loved you. I love you.” _

I love you, so I deserve you. I love you, so it’s okay. I love you, so you sit down and shut the hell up, because we both know what I’m capable of.

_ She heard it for the first time, and it scared her so badly that she didn’t know who she was for a moment. Scared her so badly that she tipped the table forward, hot black coffee slopping over his chest, he yelled and swore and all she could think was that he showed more emotion in that second then when she told him she didn’t love him anymore. _

_ And it was then she knew she had to leave and never look back. _

_ \-- _

And that, she thinks, is what I did.

It wasn’t easy, of course. It is still the hardest thing she’s ever done in her entire life, getting up from that breakfast table and walking out the door. She drove straight to Spencer’s house and stayed there for a week, calculating with her lawyer best friend the precision of her best move. Emily and Hanna and Ali were in and out of the house the entire week, more in than out, all of them confessing decidedly that this very suggestion had been on their minds and almost their lips, but that everything was so fragile - that they didn’t know how to - that they were so sorry -

_ Don’t apologize,  _ she had said fiercely.  _ This was none of our fault. _

And then he had started calling her. Every day, several times and texts throughout the night, increasingly desperate.  _ Come back. I’m sorry. I love you. Come back. I’m sorry. I love you. _

It was terrifying, it was like living that life she had escaped all over again. She began to tiptoe around corridors again. She had began to measure her breathing, like she was conserving it for who knows what might come next. She had began to live again like she was sixteen and being stalked, and she had been terrified, terrified down to her brittle bones,  _ that she had never escaped that life for a second. _

She drains the wine glass, centers herself. It’s been a long time since she let herself think about all of this.

The last time she saw him -

_ No,  _ she tells herself,  _ no. Don’t go there. _

But of course she does.

\--

_ It was not romantic, and it was not beautiful. But nothing about their relationship was. _

_ A lot of their visits had been supervised up to then, by mediators or lawyers. Additionally, most of their contact had been through email. She had been so effing terrified of what he would do, what he might do, what he could do, if she tried to drag him through for all of it, and she was already too worn out before the divorce proceedings even began, that she had told him she was citing irreconcilable differences, and having fallen out of mutual love and affection, as reason for the divorce. _

_ He’d been scared too,  though she did not realize till later. He didn’t push at all, not for a single thing. He realized quickly that he’d lost, and he even stopped emailing after Spencer wrote him an email bleeding rage with every word, threatening to sue him for everything he had. _

Don’t forget that we know everything,  _ she had written. Aria hadn’t read any more of it. Someday, she thought she might ask Spencer to show her it. Someday, she thought she might need it. _

_ Their last day was in a lawyer’s office, where they had met to close the final proceedings, sign the last papers. And when they walked outside and looked at each other, he had the nerve - the goddamn audacity - to smile slightly. _

_ “Well, that’s a wrap,” he said, as if they were two people reaching an amicable break. As if he had not taken every piece of her childhood and burned it alive. As if he had not spent years meticulously breaking her down and promising her it was love. _

_ “Remember my conditions,” she said, keeping her teeth gritted, terrified that all of the fear and bile and terror would fall out of her mouth if she didn’t. Terrified that she would cry if she did not. “You’re gone. I never want to see your effing face, ever again. If you do, I will tell the police everything.” _

_ That goddamn smile did not drop off his face. _

_ “We can keep in touch though, yeah?” _

_ For a second there was pure red rage and nothing else. She blinked and the world was more clear - _

_ than it had been since she was sixteen years old, and she - _

_ \-- _

She stops her memory there, picks up the wine glass, and carries it downstairs, to the kitchen, where she rinses it and puts it in the dishwasher. She’ll run it tonight. For now, she decides, she’s going to to go to the studio and work on some of her photos. She’s wasted enough time today, as it is.

\--

_ Ezra Fitz was never seen again, which made sense, because he had gotten a divorce, and he had, after all, for all intents and purposes, boarded a flight to Paris that day, never to have returned to Rosewood. _

_ No one was looking for him anyway.  _

_ And no one would ever know where he was, where he really was. Because if there was one thing Aria had learned how to do in her teenage years - aside from learning how to effectively bury a body - it was how to win the damn game. _

**Author's Note:**

> ...'cause two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.


End file.
